Inspiration

I'm grateful you made time and glad you resonated. I just finished the series .. and am experiencing A LOT of internal resonance & dissonance.

He releases episodes far apart but they are all gems. His latest episode (a segment from a collaboration with other history podcasters) is probably the best 25 minutes I've heard ever:

Why were there Japanese people in an Israeli airport killing Puerto Rican Christians to support Arabs who hated Jews?

Your framing of this as a generative process reminded of Robert Pirsig's explorations in Lila. If I were to put it in terms of "generative process", Pirsig, I believe, would say that you are witnessing several simultaneous unfolding processes that are intertwined in both inter-dependent and oppositional relationships. Pirsig's framework includes 5 "ethical realms": inorganic, organic, social, intellectual, and dynamic.

eg: http://iamronen.com/blog/2010/05/02/reading-lila-morals-ideas-kill-societies/

Discernment between these "levels" is needed to comprehend the wholeness of such complex historical processes.

Absolutely, with lots of second and third order effects between them. The podcast makes a first approach in that sense, but I do not think that it is a kind of process you can design/predict in advance but one you can interpret afterwards...

DISCO Elements DAOs with purpose and egalitarian orientation

The DISCO Elements are quite relevant for our project, but I want to point out the value accounting approah, which could inform some of our early conversations on the convinience or not of a sort of "scorecard" https://disco.coop/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DisCO_Elements_v1-3.pdf

"Ancient Art "One Stroke Painting"

"Ancient Art "One Stroke Painting" reborn in this Dragon by Keisuke Teshima". Ealborating from @Ronen Hirsch's comments at Discord, some ideas to take into account when thinking on generative process that look simple:

-The importance of technique, the need to develope the skill
-The importance of the right tool/resources
-The problem of being mentally stuck in modern Western approaches
-The often neglected wisdom of tradition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZFHiixUU5k

Yok Hui novel approach to group-based privacy in online communities

Yuk Hui has many intersting insights, and some practical proposals we may consider. In this video (min. 30 aprox) explains this paper, in which he presents an interesting "framework for group-based privacy preserving recommender systems".

I dreamed about you all last night. Coming here to mark it in our digital record :)

In the dream, @Ronen Hirsch and I were in my office with Nico; Ronen was holding him while I was getting set up on Discord for a call with @Toni Blanco and @Josh Fairhead . Toni had double booked himself and was letting us know he was running late trying to get out of his other meeting. Ronen was very sweet and nurturing with Nico. That's all I remember ... but I'll say that it felt really inspiring to wake up this morning with y'all's co-presence in my space.

I have been deeply moved by this beautiful dream ❤️

this arrived at and went through my heart ...

Open source alternative to Clubhouse

Sergio pointed me to this open source tool that is emerging as alternative to Clubhouse. It is only sync audio interaction based, but. https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/ll2bwq/jam_an_open_source_clubhouse_w_webrtc/
https://jam.systems/

Origami - Religious Conversion

Yesterday I shared this video on Discord with a reluctant recommendation. I specifically pointed to the last part of the conversation where a notion of "religious conversion" came up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3qCtw7MPR0

@Alex Rodriguez ingested the video and asked about the possible resonance with our work .... and in response to that, I took a huge word-dump on discord :) I'd like to try to capture this interaction here and hopefully with more conciseness and clarity.

I recalled this quote from Nature of Order:

A descriptive program, like a blueprint or a plan, describes an object in some detail, whereas a generative program describes how to make an object …

consider Origami … by folding a piece of paper in various directions, it is quite easy to make a paper hat or a bird from a single sheet. To describe in any detail the final form of the paper with the complex relationships between its parts is really very difficult, and not of much help in explaining how to achieve it. Much more useful and easier to formulate are instructions on how to fold the paper …

Origami provides, at least in my mind, a wonderful metaphor for "religious conversion" ... as in "the piece of paper goes through a religious conversion" ... and it does not by "envisioning a bird" but by going through a sequence of simple (even mechanistic!) transformations.

You do not need to know what the origami bird will look like. Heck, you don't even need to know you are making a bird. If you follow the correct sequence of transformations you will arrive at a bird. Almost anyone can follow the same sequence and arrive at a bird.

Most conversations I encounter today seem to gravitate towards imaginal/envisioning = describing what the bird looks like (what is the new normal? what is the meta-crisis? etc.). In contrast, I am hoping that our work will lead to sequences that anyone can follow that will lead to new ... birds :) That is what I mean when I talk about practice. Keep practicing ... regularly ... with others ... and let's see what arises FROM the practice.

Practice, in this context, is not a means to an end ... the notion of "utility" should be flushed out of it ... practice for the sake of practice ... because you are drawn to it, because it inspires you, because it nourishes you. Similar to something @Toni Blanco wrote a while back in the context of our work: every gathering, every Loomio thread, every discord interaction should be rewarding in and of itself ... regardless of what we "achieve" together.

... so much for conciseness :)